


Captain America Versus the Dunkelkorps

by hellkitty



Category: Indiana Jones Series, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Community: zombi_fic_ation, Crossover, Gen, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 10:29:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1815307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My zombi-fic-ation fic: first time writing either fandom so...be gentle.<br/>Le prompt: 002. Any Fandom -- Any Character(s) -- An archaeological expedition has uncovered Bran's Cauldron (a Celtic artifact used in the Welsh tales to bring dead soldiers back to life to fight again). It will revolutionize combat! (Repost 2013 004.)</p>
<p>(I think I was the original poster of this prompt so oops? Undead prompt?) </p>
<p>Everything about Bran's cauldron is true to Celtic lore (my mom would be SO PROUD of how I'm using my Honors Thesis), and the Chiemsee Cauldron does exist, but as far as I know, has not been stolen by HYDRA.  </p>
<p>Yet. ^_~</p>
            </blockquote>





	Captain America Versus the Dunkelkorps

**Helicarrier, somewhere over the Atlantic, present day.**

Steve didn’t think he’d ever get used to chinos. They looked like the uniforms he remembered, the tan Class A trousers. Strange how people wore them for streetclothes now. He preferred the looser legs of proper trousers, double-pleated down the front, with a sharp knife-crease and a cuff at the break.  Those were what all the Hollywood stars wore—well, the ones in his era.  These clung a little too close, especially around the inseam, and there was no consideration if you dressed right or left.  Just…weird. But not as weird as the skinny jeans Director Fury had shown him, he was thinking, as he rounded the corner on the helicarrier, drawing himself up short just a little too late, bumping into the small female SHIELD agent, knocking a folder from her hands.  

“I’m sorry,” he said, dropping quickly down to one knee, helping her gather up the papers that spilled from the file.  “I should look where I’m goi--.” He cut himself short, looking at a photograph. It was high resolution, vivid color, bright gold, grey stone.  He looked up at the agent. “I need to see Director Fury.”

***

 

"So you're saying you've seen this before." Fury tapped the photograph.

"Seen it. Destroyed it, or so I thought."  Destroyed it way before they had photography like this, so clean and high resolution it seemed realer than real.

"This was discovered in 2001, in a lake.”

“Not the same one, then,” Steve said.  “In a lake where?”

“Chiemsee.   Bavaria.  It was stolen a few months ago.”

“And that’s where SHIELD comes in?” It would make sense.

Fury nodded. “Twenty-three pounds of almost-pure gold? We figure someone could fund something big with that much money.”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t think they’d melt it down. Not if they knew what it was—well, what the one I knew was.”

“Some ugly-ass art.”

A wry headshake. "No. It was a Nazi thing. Look. It's...complicated."

"Complicated."  Fury didn't like 'complicated'. Especially not from Steve Rogers.  "How 'bout you start at the beginning."

 

**RAF Christchurch,  April, 1942, SSR**

“How about we start at the beginning,” Agent Carter said, laying a thick oaktag folder in front of each of them. Steve tried not to be captivated by the chestnut curls tumbling over her shoulders, the way the green of the SSR uniform perfectly set off her pale complexion, her eyes. “1941, off the coast of Anglesey. A German ship.  At first, we’d thought it was espionage, and we watched the coast closely at night, for signs, signals, any kind of communication. The ship was active at night, but we never saw anything—nothing so much as a diver or motorboat—move toward shore.”

Steve nodded, a little confused, more than a little desperate to make a good impression. As far as he knew, he was just the dancing war-bond pony. He had no idea why they’d brought him here, but he wasn’t about to complain.  This felt secret, big, important.

“Weapons testing,” Howard Stark said, riffling through his own folder.

“Not quite. If you could turn to page 15.”

Steve flipped through the file, finding 15: a hazy picture of what looked like a large bowl, heavily repousseed.  They knew he’d been an art student: maybe that was why they'd brought him here. The irony hadn't escaped him: he'd been beyond worthless to the US Army before the supersoldier program, and after? He was a pretty poster boy for war bonds.  It wasn't why he'd signed up, and he told himself, or tried to, that it was still doing good.  But it was beyond funny that now they called him here for his art education.

"Celtic, it looks like." It was hard to tell from the blurry photographs, but he recognized the style enough, the hieratic scaling, the poses. "It would explain Anglesey, though, maybe."

“You didn’t bring me here for art,” Howard Stark said. There was a ‘you’d better not have’ in the tone.

"This isn't merely art." A new voice, male, from the doorway, and Steve and Howard’s heads turned to follow the newcomer in: the battered tweedy walking hat, travel-worn blazer.  "This comes a little closer to, well, magic."

“Ah, Dr Jones,” Agent Carter nodded, sliding another folder across the table toward him. “So glad you could make it.”

"Magic." Steve almost wanted to check his ears.  

“Ridiculous,” Stark snorted. “There’s no such—“

“—such thing as magic. Yes, yes. So I’ve heard, time and again. Yet two thousand years of literature would seem to argue otherwise.”  He fished in his blazer, drawing out a pair of spectacles, studying the pictures. “Ah yes, the Pair Dadeni.”  He gave a nod, knowingly.

“Say what?” Stark asked.

“Pair Dadeni,” Jones repeated, as if Stark merely hadn’t heard. “The Cauldron of Bran the Blessed.”

“Who is this guy?” Stark turned to Carter.

“Dr Henry Jones. He’s a specialist in Medieval Literature.”

“In the Grail, particularly,” Jones added. “And this is one branch of the Grail story.”

“I thought the Grail was, you know, connected to Jesus,” Steve said, sitting up. This was not at all where he’d thought this would go.

“The cup of the Christ, yes,” Jones said. “But there’s a pagan tradition, the Sankgreal, in Celtic literatures.” He dug into his coat again, drawing out a battered notebook.  “It is considered one of the four treasures of Annwn—Wales,” he said, looking up, “Bran’s Cauldron has the ability to return the dead to life.”

“Ridiculous,” Stark scoffed.

“Is it?” Jones countered. “Not so long ago, a man named Charles Lyell posited that rivers carved the great canyons, such as the Grand Canyon. A single river. He was laughed at, ridiculed. Now, we take that as a basic scientific truth.”  

“You’re talking life and death. Frankenstein, the stuff of bad science fiction, not basic geology,” Stark said.

“The stuff of God,” Steve added, quietly.

“The stuff of these gods, definitely,” Jones said, as though that were the final word.

Carter’s matte-red mouth pursed, following the fast exchange. “How about we see for ourselves, gentlemen, then decide what to call it: science fiction or science fact?”

“You have it?” Steve and Jones spoke at the same time, one excited, one appalled.

“Not quite. What we do have is, well, another mystery.” She pressed a button on the building’s intercom. “Bring it—him—in, please?”  She turned toward the men at the table. “About a month ago—twenty-six days, to be precise—we began hearing about some mysterious new unit, the ‘Dunkelkorps’.”

“Dark?” Steve asked. He wasn’t an expert, but you didn’t study art history without picking up some German.  “Dark corps?”

She nodded, chestnut waves bobbing on her shoulders. “At first we thought it was just to sound, well, ominous.  Nazis are nothing if not masters of verbal impressions. But we found out, eventually, it was quite literal.” She turned as the door beside her opened, two American GIs, fully armed, leading in what looked like a man, in a thin German uniform.  A fringe of faded blond hair, mange-riddled, clung to the scalp bared as thin hands swept off a garrison cap.

Looked _like_ a man, because, well, he was…blue? Not a bright shade, but the mottled purply blue of livor mortis.  “Dunkelkorps,” Steve breathed. The name made sense.  

The man’s eyes were black, or seemed black, as though the pupils had expanded, invading the whole iris, looking dully around the room, at each of them in turn, as one of the GIs fetched a chair. “Sit,” the GI said, and the man bent at the knees, abruptly, dropping into the chair obediently.  

Jones sat forward, adjusting his spectacles. “Fascinating.”  

“Wretched-smelling,” Stark said, wrinkling his nose.  He was right: there was something off how he smelled—not like rotting, really, more like tarnish and last year’s wet leaves.  Like the grave, Steve thought, suddenly. The figure in the chair seemed thin, spare, almost cachectic, Steve thought, lips shrunken, pulled back from the teeth in a sort of rictus, the skin thin and leathery, as though it had been eating away at itself under the strange, burning black eyes.

“He’s clean,” one of the GIs said.  “Showered, clean uniform, deloused, everything. It’s just…him.”  

“Johann Kalb,” Carter said. “That was the name we found on papers.”  

“Is that his name? Is that your name?” Stark turned toward the bluish figure. “They have to say that, right? Name, rank, serial number?”  

“He can’t,” said the shorter of the GIs, whose nametape labeled him ‘Sabaudia’. “Not a word, even a whole truckload full of them, dead damn silent. Eerie as hell. He can nod, though.”  He turned to the seated figure. “Nod if your name is Kalb.”

The man—man? Steve thought—nodded, stiffly, but definitely.  “He understands English,” Steve noted, maybe stating the obvious, but sometimes clues hid in plain sight.

“Kalb,” Jones interjected. “Did you learn English? In school?”  

No response, till the GI prodded him. “Answer.” Two nods, the black eyes fixing Jones’s face soberly.  

“What was that?”

“He’s…real particular about who he listens to. Right guy and he’s obedient like a puppy. Different guy and he’s just a lump,” the other GI supplied. "All of them are like that."

“Blood of kings,” Jones murmured.

“What?”

“Blood of kings,” he repeated, turning toward Stark. “Superstition or magic or science, there are rules.”

“You’re saying that, what? Sabaudia here?”

“House of Savoy,” Jones said. “One of the oldest royal families in the Western world.”

“Hear that, man? You’re a king,” the other soldier gibed.  

“And I’d trade my kingdom for some real butter on my bread tonight.” Sabaudia retorted. "Or real coffee."

"Keep dreaming, GI."

“So he only listens to royalty?” Steve asked. “Must be hell on the chain of command.”

“You know how many Habsburgs they’ve got running around Germany these days?” Stark countered.  But he was interested, almost in spite of himself.

“Kalb, if I may,” Jones sat up, approaching, holding out a photograph, the blurry one of the cauldron. “Do you remember seeing this?”

The black eyes flickered in something that might have been emotion, before a sharp nod.  

“Did you die?” Steve asked. “I mean, if it’s not too rude to ask.”

“Anyone who smells like that can’t accuse anyone else of rudeness,” Stark muttered, but his eyes were fixed just like Steve’s on Kalb’s face as he nodded. The dark hands moved, skinny wrists almost pathetic in the heavy wool of his uniform, stirring on his legs, brushing the buttons of his uniform jacket.

“You want to show us? Can you?”

A stiff twitch of the head before another nod, and the hands moved, stiffly, like he was old and arthritic, unbuttoning the uniform top, pulling aside the undershirt underneath, to show what looked like a blackish mess, like a crater impact, over his heart.  

“He got a couple more hits when we took ‘em captive,” the other GI, Martens, said. “They look about the same. Healed over but not really. Oozy.”

"From some wounds," Sabaudia said. "The ones they got when we took 'em? They still got 'em. Head wounds, missing limbs, just, still there."  

“Impossible to kill,” Steve said.

“You can’t kill what’s already dead,” Jones said, quietly.  

“So, this is some, what, Nazi magic thing to create unstoppable supersoldiers,” Stark said, wryly.

“Because America never does anything like that,” Steve said, with an obvious cough.  It felt strange, looking at this man, and thinking they might have that in common: created by their country to better fight the war.  There but for the grace of God, Steve thought.  

“You’re science,” Stark retorted. “Not this…zombie thing.”

“He’s not a zombie, if he remembers who he is,” Steve countered.  “Which he clearly does.”

“Zombies are technically African in origin, and their sentience, well, has never been studied.” Jones said, “But in this case, it’s a very close analogy.”

“A Nazi semi-zombie, then. Much better.”  Stark turned to Kalb again. “Did you agree to it?” Stark leaned forward for the first time, tapping  a pencil in a quick staccato on his folder. “Did you consent to what they did?”

The face moved again, crunching up, and there was the wheeze of air, like the suck of a punctured lung, and a black goo began oozing from the corner of his eyes, blue hands knotting together, knuckles like knots. The nails were long, whitish grey, almost like claws, scraping the black ichor from his cheek.  The smell was...the only word Steve could think of was ‘unholy’.

“Christ,” Martens said, jumping back, horrified.

“Crying,” Jones said, coolly. “Apparently, Dr Stark, the answer is ‘no’.”

Even Carter looked shaken, red mouth even brighter against her paled skin. “T-take him outside. Get him cleaned up and…something nice.”  The GIs’ hands were surprisingly gentle, coaxing Kalb to his feet, moving him carefully toward the door. There was a collective exhalation as the door closed.

“Well,” Stark said, tilting back in his chair, hands folded over his chest. “That sure was a hell of a thing.”  

“Still believe it’s science fiction?”

He shook his head.  “No science I know of, though.” But this time, all hostility was gone, replaced by an intense curiosity—a science he didn’t know, but was dying to plumb the depths of.

“Science and magic combined,” Jones said, stroking his short beard. “Like matter and anti-matter.”

“Leave the science part to the experts,” Stark said, but there wasn’t much heat in his voice. “If I could study him. Dissect him—.”

“No,” Carter said, sharply. “With all due respect, Dr Stark, Kalb is a prisoner of war, due the same rights as anyone under the Geneva Conventions.”

“He’s dead,” Stark shrugged. “Dead people don’t have rights.”

"Dr Stark. If we do...things," the word pulled by her mouth in an expression of distaste, "to him, then we are no better than the Nazis."  

She was right. War was hell, but you had to not let yourself fall into the abyss.

“He knows who he is, though,” Steve said. He was still shaken by the tears, but the inchoate horror ate at him. Imagine being brought back from death. Leave aside how much it must have hurt, to die, to be dragged back from the brink again. But think of the horror of it, your body changed, your mind altered, mute and knowing exactly what a monstrosity you were. Kalb couldn’t go back to the life he’d had, even if the war ended tomorrow. How could you go on? “Can they be killed, though?” It felt inhumane to even be asking, even though Kalb was no longer in the room.

Carter shook her head.  “The only way we’ve discovered involves a complete bodily disintegration—high explosive bombs, land mines. We’re, you can imagine, loath to use those in cold blood. They can lose limbs, even parts of their brains, and live. Kalb is just….”

“More presentable than others you have,” Jones said, rubbing his graying beard.  “Which would mean eternal torture under dissection." The comment was a dart at Stark, who frowned behind his thin mustache.  

“We don’t even know if he can feel pain,” Stark said, but it was the voice of a scientist on a losing slope of an argument.

“Physical pain, maybe not,” Carter said. “But you saw: he has emotions.”

"Besides,” Jones offered. “There’s nothing to be learned from him. It’s the cauldron that holds the secrets.”

“Secrets that I’m not sure we should mess with,” Steve said, eyes still on the door where Kalb had disappeared, haunted. He shouldn't be feeling sympathy for a Nazi, he shouldn't, but still...there were things too horrible to hold old enmities again.

“I admit I’d be curious to get a look at it.  It has to have some kind of power source.”

“You’d be surprised,” Jones said, riffling through his notebook. “As I’d said, blood of kings.”  He pointed to the intricate repoussee.  “Pour blood along this, and it creates, I imagine, patterns. Mystical patterns.”

“Great. Of course. Mystical patterns. Human sacrifice,” Stark said, throwing up his hands. “Why am I not surprised?”

“You will be,” Jones said, and his eyes, behind his spectacles, glinted with amusement. “It’s not…quite…human sacrifice.” He tipped his chin at Agent Carter. “But it’s perhaps not suitable for mixed company.”

“I assure you, Dr Jones,” Carter said, firmly. “I’m an agent. There’s not much that can shock me.”

Jones gave a sort of ‘suit yourself’ shrug. “It’s a specific wound. A genital wound.” He slid his notebook over toward Stark, where a pen and ink illustration made clear what he meant.

“Oh.”

“Oh,” Steve echoed, craning over and then wishing he hadn’t.  

“Indeed,” Jones said.

“Well,” Stark pursed his mouth for a long moment, his mustache stretching over his lips. “I think I”ll stick to my kind of science.”

“What this means,” Carter said, reaching over to turn the notebook around, to see for herself. It struck Steve as more to make a point of not being excluded than needing to see. God knows he’d seen enough. “We haven’t found any bodies like this, so that means there are some castrated men walking around.”

“Agent Carter!” Steve felt shocked.

“Grow up, gentlemen, honestly. There’s a war on.”

“Well,” Jones said. “It seems many of our interests align—save a sacred relic of an ancient British peoples, stop the Nazi horror.”

“I’m in,” Stark said.  

“Me too,” Steve said. “I don’t know how we can stop it, but we have to.” Not just for America, not just for the war, but for people like Kalb, men—once men—turned to horrors.  

 

 

**Present Day, over Normandy**

“So,” Fury said, arms folded.  Only Coulson looked rapt, the thrill of getting a real Captain America story from the source himself.  “I presume our side won.”

“Of course,” Coulson said, pen skipping over the pad he was taking notes on.  “We’re not up to our ears in blue Nazis, for one thing.”

“Master race, my ass,” Tony Stark said. “My father never mentioned this.”

“He wouldn’t,” Steve said. “We were sworn to secrecy, for one thing. And there wasn’t much left for Dr Stark to study, unfortunately.” It didn’t feel that ‘unfortunate’ though. Some things were better kept secret. “For another, well, even the Germans found them kind of uncomfortable. Everyone except, you know, the SS.”

“They would,” Stark said. “Perfect soldiers, really, that don’t ask any inconvenient questions about conscience.”

It was bitter, but accurate enough, Steve thought.

“Dr Jones said—“

“And that’s the other thing,” Stark said. “Who is this mysterious Dr Jones? How come I’ve never heard of him?”

Fury interjected, “Dr Jones, and his son, are legit.  His son has personally assisted the United States government in acquiring some…,” he cleared his throat, “rare assets.”  

“So what happened? How did you do it?” Coulson asked.

He hesitated, trying to sort out what was important for SHIELD and what was, well, important for other reasons.  “We, well, he helped us find the base.  He couldn’t read or write—apparently that’s how it works. Dr Jones said it was because Bran’s culture was pre-literate.” It didn’t have to make sense at the time, it was just what they had to deal with. But he remembered feeling reassured that Dr Jones seemed to know these rules--it meant there still were rules in play, however strange.

“But he could track it or something.”  Steve had sat beside him in the truck’s cab, translating Kalb’s hand gestures to directions for the driver. No one wanted to get close to him and Steve understood—the uncanny smell of rotted leaves and age ate into your mind, making you think too closely of death. But it wasn't his fault, and he was, in a sense, betraying his own side to help the Allies. He deserved someone sitting right next to him.

They’d taken a boat into Germany, before piling into the Wehrmacht military truck that some OSS office had acquired for them. It had been hard not to think, to ask, Kalb about this place, what it was like before the war. They drove by a bombed out orchard, and the shattered apple tree branches, had brought a twitch over Kalb’s face. It must have been beautiful, Steve had thought, in peacetime, the trees burdened under masses of white petals. Or later in fall, red apples like drops of blood hanging from the branches.  He could still see the last brown-withered petals clinging to some branches, hinting at what had been, promising the bloom of apples and cherries. Apples that Kalb could never taste again—consigned to exist, without appetite, without sensation, only the memories of the tastes of apples, the smell of springtime and laden branches.

Kalb felt it, too--Steve knew it, by the way the black eyes lingered on the broken branches, a dead wreck looking at another dead wreck, both ruined by the war.  

He didn’t mention the moment, when they’d pulled into the abandoned Keramikwerks, and the driver had hopped down to get the others out of the back of the truck, how he’d sat with Kalb for a long moment, before covering the clay-cold blue hand with his own. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” he’d said, quietly.  It didn’t matter that Kalb was a Nazi, that he’d probably killed American troops before he’d died himself.  Maybe it should have mattered, still, but Steve just couldn’t see it that way, couldn’t see Kalb as anything but a victim.

Kalb nodded, the hand stiff in Steve’s, before the driver’s door opened.  “He staying here?” Bucky asked, tipping his head at Kalb, loose chinstrap of his helmet swinging. It was more of a suggestion than a question. “Not keen on getting shot in the back by a zombie.”

Steve frowned, but levered his way out of the door. “It’s safer for you to stay here,” he said to Kalb. A compromise, a least. “When this is over, Dr Stark can work on a cure. I mean, he’s a little, you know, blunt, but he’s good. A genius. You’ll see.”  There had to be a cure, didn’t there?  Kalb had to have a future, some way to make this better.  If only Dr Erskine was still alive….

It was a doomed hope, but maybe it would help Kalb to hold it, if just for a little while.  Or maybe Steve needed the hope himself.  

There wasn’t time for Kalb’s answer, there wasn’t time for more of that train of thought: he had to run to catch up to the others, vibranium shield in front of him.  

He didn’t mention any of that to the group sitting around the SHIELD conference table, just the assault, moving into the building. “Standard formation. They weren’t expecting us, figuring we were just another layover of German troops. There was hasty resistance.  We’d worried, obviously, about having some of them attack us.”

“The Dunkelkorps, the blue guys,” Stark said.  

Steve nodded.  “We found out later most of the ones they’d made had been deployed.  There were only about ten left at the Keramikwerks. But believe me, ten was more than enough.”  It had been awful: the soldiers, ordered by a Hauptmann, advancing ruthlessly, continuing doggedly onward despite shots to the head, the heart, a dozen wounds that would have been fatal. It was one thing to think of an unstoppable undead soldier: quite another to confront one, to see it rise, time and again, leaking dark blood and mottled pink organs, injuries that would pale the face of a hardened surgeon, moving, shambling forward.

In the end, they’d had to disarm them, disable them: one cut in half by machine gun fire, carefully sidestepped; another Steve had to shear off the arms with his shield--the list of brutalities went on and on--another reason no one wanted to talk about it. To fight monsters they had had to become...unsoldierly.

He hurried past that part, too, but he knew some shadow of it hid in his voice. “There was a—a truck, in the back. A refrigerated truck, with bodies—Germans, Americans, some Russians, too.”

“Their next batch,” Coulson said.

“That’s what we think, yes. We found that later, of course.  The guards there were told to protect the cauldron—Kessel, they called it—at all costs. They fell back, position to position, until they were massed around it. Dangerous place, the walls just a nest of ricochets. They stopped us there and things got pretty rough. The last of the, uh, the blue soldiers were blocking our retreat. We were pinned down.  They were using the ventilation from the kiln room—trying to gas us. Mustard gas, sinks low to the ground.  We had masks, but, well, it’s hard to fight when you can’t see what you’re shooting at. The cauldron,” he sketched a shape with his hands, “was suspended from a series of catwalks, by long chains.”

“Sounds pretty dire.”

“Sounds positively medieval.”

He wasn’t trying to make a story out of this, nothing big and exciting, nothing with suspense. He was here, talking to them—they knew he’d survived. “We’d faced worse,” he said, modestly.  

“So? You gonna tell us the punchline?” Stark, still not one for heroic narratives, apparently.

Punchline made it sound like a joke.  Steve frowned. “Dr Jones had given us the hint, really.  He’d said something to Stark, your dad,, about matter and anti-matter combining.  Which meant all we had to do—“

“Was get something alive inside the cauldron? That seems kind of stupid. I mean, rats, spiders, bugs get in everything.”  

Steve shrugged. “I just know what worked. Maybe it had to be a human, or at least something big.”

“So, who was the lucky bastard?”

“That’s just it. Barnes and I were making a plan—I’d use the shield, cut a path through.  We were arguing who it should be, which one of us. And then.”

“Then. Come on, man, you’re killing us with the suspense here." Stark caught a dark look from Natasha, and relented. "Uh. Bad choice of words. Sorry.”

“And then Kalb,” Steve said. “He’d gotten out, come around back. Maybe he’d seen the truck, I don’t know.  He just…appeared, behind the guards on the catwalk, grabbed one of them, and leapt.”  His eyes shut briefly. “There was an explosion, brighter than anything I could imagine. Sabaudia went blind because of it, looking right at it around the corner.  Even through the gas mask. And when we could see again, the cauldron was…gone. Just half-melted scraps of metal from the chain hooks, and a big charred…mess on the ground below.”  They hadn't been able to find any bones, the fire burning so hot it had incinerated everything. 

A long, uncomfortable silence.  It seemed fitting, really.  He’d seen Kalb’s face, the instant he’d grabbed the other Nazi soldier, and Kalb’s face held no anger, only a desperate grief, an aching desire to put an end to it all. Steve's thin attempt at hope had failed.  

“And so this Chiemsee Cauldron. You think it’s the same old story.”

“It’s an exact replica of the Pair Dadeni,” Steve said. “As near as we could tell.”

"It was," Fury said,  carefully, "created by a Nazi, before the war's end."

“That just leaves the loose end of the, ahem.” Coulson looked up from the notes he was jotting. “The, uh, the special wound.”

“A lot of Schutstaffel—SS—memberships required, or at least made a big deal about—genealogies,” Steve said.  Coulson nodded agreement.  He was a World War Two history buff, either a side effect of his fascination with the story of Captain America, or vice versa. “Including, as it turns out, another Johann, Schmidt.”

“Red Skull,” Coulson said, almost automatically, then pausing, letting it sink in. “Well, that would explain a lot.” Only people who knew him well could catch the wry humor.

Steve nodded.  “And if someone got a hold of his research….”

“Point is, we know how to handle it, this time.” Fury nodded.  “Makes it more urgent to track it down.” He placed his palms on the table, standing up. “Well, we know what to do—Stark, look through your father’s notes, just in case.  I’ll contact Dr Jones’s son, see if we can get our hands on that notebook.  Coulson, try to find a way to check Interpol reports without sounding too weird. Natasha—“

“I’ll start working contacts in the Ukraine,” she said.  

“And me?” Steve rose, too, tugging the chinos down as he stood.

“You can help Agent Hill, make sure this is all in the files this time.”

Steve nodded, turning to leave.

“So you’re saying,” Natasha spoke up, falling into step beside him, “that the free world was saved by a blue Nazi zombie.”  

“No,” Steve said, but there was no anger in his tone. He hadn't told them--it seemed like a betrayal of confidence--of the picture he'd found when they'd gone back to the truck: on the seat he'd been sitting on next to Kalb, a faded photograph of a young woman, with a smile that seemed to lift right off the paper, thick hair in braids crossed over her head, and on the back a delicate inscription 'meiner lieben Johann'.  He knew what it meant, a last message from a dying man: everything he'd never have again, everything that made life worth living. Not the war, not cause or ideology or anything other than love and happiness.  The Nazis, his own side, had stolen more from Kalb than death itself could.  

Whatever Kalb had been or done before, what they’d turned him into, what he’d suffered, had erased any difference, anything between their sides other than a man losing what it was to be human.  And maybe that’s why Natasha was asking, maybe she wanted to believe in redemption. “I’m saying the world was saved by Johann Kalb, a hero and a man.”


End file.
